Yahoo!'s Search Stats from Different Studies Aren't Matching

Yahoo!'s Search market share is presented very differently by the two major companies that have conducted studies regarding the number of American people who performed searches in June. According to comScore, 20.9% of the users resorted to Yahoo! with their queries. However, Nielsen Online says that only 16.6% people relied on the Sunnyvale company for their searches. The difference might come from the fact that comScore had in sight all Yahoo!'s properties that can be used for conducting a search. In both charts, Yahoo! came in second place, after Google, which is the usual first rung on the ladder.

The differences in Google's ranking are more subtle. While comScore credits the company with 61.5% of the market, Nielsen Online gives it only 59.0%. The former market researcher marks a 0.3% diminishment in Google's coverage, at the same time with the growth of the two constant competitors - Yahoo! and MSN/Microsoft Search. The two gained 0.3 and 0.7 respectively of the market share from May, as the study reveals.

The fourth and the fifth places are not identical in the two charts. The Ask network occupies the fourth place in the comScore chart, being followed by AOL's properties. Nielsen shows that, in fact, their places should be inverted.

The discrepancies between the U.S. stats for June released by the two companies continue when it comes to the number of total searches they counted. "In June 2008, Americans conducted 11.5 billion core searches, representing a 7-percent gain versus May," says the comScore report. At the same time, Nielsen's numbers came up with only about 7.9 billion total searches.

The Nielsen report shows that the coverage Yahoo! sites have in the search market decreased by 12.4% from last year, while Window's Live Search increased by approximately the same percentage. As Google's expansion reached 19%, it becomes clear that only some revolutionary features, along with an aggressive campaign, could determine people to change their mind about the way they conduct their queries.